Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
Check out my other blog at taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Monday, January 27, 2014

It certainly CAN solve things. Didn't
violence solve the problem of the Axis fascist alliance trying to

take over the world in World War II?

And didn't violence finally drive the
United States out of Vietnam?

And violence drove the Soviet Union out
of Afghanistan, the goal of the U.S., Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia.
They were happy about that. They achieved their goal- and after a few
more years the Saudis and Pakis achieved their further aim of
installed a medieval, fanatical theocracy in power there.

And what about white Southern racists?
They have ruled the Confederate states since the founding of the
U.S., with only a brief interregnum after the Civil War. A
Confederate intelligence network assassinated Abraham Lincoln. That
changed history by putting a white supremacist, Andrew Johnson, in
the presidency of the U.S. With Johnson's help- which was so extreme
that his contumacious violating of U.S. laws forced Congress to
finally impeach him, but a few Republicans lost their nerve and voted
him Not Guilty in the Senate, even though he overwhelming was- the
white racists soon re-

established their slave state in
disguised form, using terrorism as an important part of their
strategy.

[Their terrorism formation, the Ku Klux
Klan, or KKK, was later lionized by the notorious filmmaker D.W.
Griffith in his racist propaganda movie Birth of a Nation. Racist
Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, who purged the Federal
government of black employees, was such a big fan of the film that he

dragooned others into watching it.
Griffith is honored on a U.S. postage stamp and his noxious movie is
in the pantheon of “movie classics,” which speaks volumes about
the U.S. political system and American culture.]

Then there are successful
insurrections, guerrilla movements, rebellions, revolutions, in which
those seeking the overthrow of an established regime achieve their
goal. However, the vast majority of uprisings and armed movements
fail, so just on a statistical basis it's a dangerous route to take
for political, social, and economic change. And in the current era,
given the propensity of the United States especially to take sides in
the internal affairs of other nations, movements that are opposed by
the U.S. are effectively fighting the U.S. too, not just the local
power structure. This is the reason the Palestinian people's
situation is so hopeless, for example. It is also why countries like
Guatemala and Honduras are trapped in a never-ending hell. Both
reform and revolution are impossible there- as the recent coup
against the elected president of Honduras a few years back confirmed
what was already proven by earlier U.S. coups and military
dictatorships in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil, etc.

All this is not to argue that violence
is desirable. Unless one is pathological, one has to agree
that violence should always be a last resort in all matters. [1]
Nor is violence never futile- obviously, like any attempt to solve a
problem or achieve a goal, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
(obviously it doesn't work for the losing side in wars) and sometimes
it's partially successful and partially not.

Then there are the ambiguous situations
where violence changes things without a clear outcome, so there is a
new reality. In that case it's like reshuffling a deck of cards.

Finally, it's not an on-off switch,
violence-no violence. It's more a spectrum, with total pacifism at
one pole- letting police and Klansmen physically assault you without
any attempt at self-defense, for example- this part of King's
ideology was beloved by part of the U.S. ruling class, for obvious
reasons- at at the other extreme, the Holocaust, or atomic bombings
of defenseless cities. In short, mindless, unreasoning hyperviolence.
There are many possible mixes in between the extremes.

You never hear the rulers say “violence
never solves anything” when they want to go to war. Nor are police
lectured that “violence never solves anything.” This is just
propaganda aimed at oppressed social groups so they won't stir up too
much trouble. It is trying to make a virtue out of weakness.

This is not to urge violent means on
the weak. There is good reason for the weak to avoid violence. Their
oppressors have far greater means of violence at their disposal, so
you're fighting on the enemy's favored terrain where they have
tremendous advantage. But there's no MORAL reason why the oppressed
shouldn't fight back physically against the oppression enforced by
violence against them. Of course this flies in the face of the two
pop philosophers that the bourgeoisie love to shove in the faces of
others- Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi, an Indian crank, and Martin
Luther King, Jr., who they reviled, relentlessly harassed and spied
on when he was alive, and then finally murdered after he came out
against the Vietnam War and got involved in labor struggles, raising
the dangerous prospect of creating greater unity among the disparate
civil rights, anti-war, and labor movements.

But all this is obvious after a mere
few seconds of reflecting on history and the reality of the world we
live in; and presumably we're all living in the same world, although
you'd never know it from the ideologies, opinions, and attitudes of
so many people.

So- morons who parrot “violence never
works” or “violence never solves anything” or “violence never

achieves anything”- could you please
stop being so dumb? Thank you.

Argue instead, if that's what you
think, that violence would be inappropriate or
counterproductive or, yes, immoral, in a particular
situation or for trying to “solve” a particular “problem.”
(And here we get into the sometimes-knotty matter of what “the
problem” IS in a given situation. The “problem” is often some
oppressor trying to get his/her way, or exert control generally, or a
person trying to impose their irrational beliefs/attitudes/feelings
on others. And people have different perspectives on some
“problems,” such as, for example, oh, say, the
“Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” an anodyne euphemism and evasion
if there ever was one.)

1] Which of course means that
many people in the U.S. power structure, for example, are pathological as they are
quick to resort to violence, and insist on getting their way always
and will use violence to get it. Gee, who'd a thunk it! They sound
so nice when they mouth their propaganda about freedom and
democracy and even human rights!

But they look good these days compared to their Syrian counterparts. Too bad when the U.S. SHOULD have gotten violent, with the Assad regime, it didn't!

Friday, January 17, 2014

Can you imagine what it would be like if a petty, vindictive, bullying tyrant like New Jersey Governor managed to seize the presidency of America, as it constantly being bruited about in the U.S. media? Here's a man whose minions closed the traffic lanes from a town in his state onto the George Washington bridge in order to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, who doesn't even belong to Christie's party, for failing to endorse Christie for reelection. (The bridge is a major thoroughfare into New York City; Fort Lee, the Jersey town in question, is on the other side of the Hudson river which separates Manhattan, the borough of NYC connected by the bridge, from New Jersey.)

Christie has a long history of thuggish political behavior. And he is in the habit of brutally verbally abusing average citizens who dare to ask questions or make comments to him that he considers challenging. Furthermore, this nasty bullying and intimidation is something he is proud of and that his underlings consider such a selling point that they gleefully disseminate videos of this crass and vulgar behavior.

Imagine if such a man had the far more immense powers of the presidency in his meaty paws. Rightists raised a stink because some rightwing tax fraudsters tried to get IRS tax status they weren't entitled to, and the IRS dragged its feet about granting it. Imagine what Christie would do. And then there's the FBI, the CIA, the DEA, the NSA, HomelandSecurity with its No-Fly list, the various terrorist lists, etc. (The Bush regime put Senator Ted Kennedy on the No-Fly list. And after the regime "apologized" to Kennedy for the "mistake," Kennedy got the same treatment again the next time he tried to fly.)

The GOP establishment already decided to promote Christie for President in 2016. He was anointed head of the Republican Governors' Association precisely so he could network and raise funds.

Much chatter in the bourgeois media speculates as to whether this will sink his presidential prospects. That is doubtful. From a distance of several years from now, this is going to look like a tempest in a teapot. So if the political nomenklatura have their way, it'll be Christie vs. "Hillary" (Clinton, that is).

Saturday, January 11, 2014

This site is a "service" of Google. I have been unable to get the email notification functions to work. There are no answers online for this problem, and Google does not provide answers or any way to contact them.

I do not know if the secret police, with or without Google's connivance, sabotaged this blog, or if Google did it at the behest of the secret police. I have experienced sabotage of Google gmail accounts however, which makes me suspicious. (Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo! email deleted all the messages from my accounts immediately after 9/11/01, obviously on instructions from the secret police.)

Unfortunately communications are more difficult in a police state such as the U.S. than in a free country.

The U.S. Government yesterday issued
its statistics for the most recent month for net job creation and the
so-called “unemployment rate.”

There was “Good News” and “Bad
News.” (Bad news is generally called “discouraging” or
“disappointing” news in the sugar-coated locutions some official
media business/economic commentators employ- and in the U.S.,
business and “economics” are inextricably linked, destroying any
objectivity the economics could have by embedding a business-centric
bias into it.)

The Bad News- only 74,000 jobs were
created in December, a very low number. The rate of job creation is
now at a three-year low. Private sector- i.e. business- “economists”
(economic soothsayers and shills) had predicted closer to 200,000 new
jobs. (But even that would have been less than needed just to keep up
with population growth, let alone reducing the mountain of unemployed
people dumped by the U.S. capitalist system in the recent recession
and financial crisis.) [1]

The Good News- the “unemployment
rate” FELL 0.3%, from 7% in November to 6.7% in December.

But how could that be with so few new
jobs created?

Easy- the Government just counts fewer
people as “workers.” Once the Government decides you're no
longer “looking for work,” you're no longer unemployed! Presto!

So, logically, the solution to
unemployment is for all unemployed people to give up trying to get
hired. Then they won't be unemployed anymore. Problem solved!!

The Government calls people whose
attempt to find employment is hopeless and who thus are not “actively
seeking work” “discouraged workers.” At the same time, they are
NOT counted as part of the labor force, and thus are not counted as
workers at all.

I wonder if they are still “consumers.”
The capitalist media speaks of “consumers” as if they aren't
workers too, or people dependent on workers to HAVE MONEY TO BUY
STUFF WITH, which is what is meant by “consuming.” They speak of
“consumers” as if they aren't the exact same people who are
dependent on income from jobs. This is voodoo economics, designed to
mystify socio-economic reality so as to prevent honest understanding-
which might lead to pressure for change, or even worse, political
activism.

1] The radio station of Michael
Bloomberg Billionaire put a happy face on it, blaming the weather-
which is totally bogus. Their survey of 90 economists also was dead
wrong on predicting the jobs-creation total- which shows how much
stock one should put in the “science” that these guys allegedly
practice. And NPR, the quasi-U.S. Government propaganda radio
network, says “the numbers sent mixed signals.” They are masters
of the mealy-mouthed, maestros of muddle. And NPR spoons out the line
that the Obama regime is doing something or other. By 5 pm NPR's John
Itsty rounded up a private economist or two to say the Government job
creation number was just wrong. Instead they pointed to the number of
private corporation ADP, which claimed 238,000 new jobs in December.
(No mention of the fact that ADP often is wildly at odds with
Government statistics,and is WRONG.)

Wednesday, January 01, 2014

To mark his last day as Caudillo- Oops! Mayor- that's an easy mistake to make- of New York City, the billionaire Michael Bloomberg sicced his "private army" (his words) the New York Police Department (NYPD) on people attending a Phish concert at Madison Square Garden.

His police arrested "at least" 228 people, mostly on "drug" charges. Some were sellers, some were users. Phish concertgoers, like "Deadheads" (Grateful Dead fans) are known "drug users." So this was rather like hyenas attacking a herd of wildebeest.

This occurred on New Year's Eve, last night, in the last hours of the plutocrat's repressive reign.

Bloomberg has managed to outdo his predecessor as Mayor, Rudolph "Hess" Giuliani, in oppression. He had his "private army" round up thousands of would-be protesters and just passers-by during the Republican National Convention when it was held in New York. (What, you believed that bullshit in the U.S. "Constitution's" "Bill of Right" about "the right of the people to peaceably assemble... shall not be abridged"? Well, I guess a sophist could say Hey, the U.S. "authorities" don't "abridge" it, they positively crush it by force, if the cause being demonstrated for is something they don't like.) They were held for days and forced to lie in dirty oil in a makeshift jail helpfully provided by the reactionary owner of Chelsea Piers, a private exercise "club." That violated a legal requirement under city and state law for their speedy arraignment- a mere technicality.

Bloomberg ramped up a racist program of mass street searches and blacks and Hispanics, his goons subjecting hundreds of thousands to hostile and humiliating searches yearly.

He ordered his cops to hunt out people carrying their own marijuana for arrest, setting records for possession arrests. (And this stinking hypocrit smoked marijuana himself. But that's par for the course for U.S. political rulers- other prominent examples among a zillion others being Bill Clinton and Al Gore, and George Bush, who was also a cokehead and a drunk. And also Barack Obama, a heavy grass smoker in college and probably high school too, who has waged war on medical marijuana dispensaries in California. He also refuses to free Federal marijuana prisoners. Combining cynicism and viciousness, our masters persecute others for smoking what they smoked.)

Bloomberg's "army" crushed the Occupy Movement in New York, in the process seizing and gratuitously destroying tens of thousands of dollars of laptops seized (photos of smashed laptops were posted online, after they had been seized and carted off to "Sanitation Department" garages, where they were apparently systematically smashed with baseball bats, given the curvatures of normally flat machines) and books. Every police state method was used: agents provocateurs, infiltrators, electronic spying and hacking, audio and video and other surveillance from specially-equipped spy trucks, and more.

Bloomberg also unleashed his police to turn the City into an Orwellian surveillance state, with tens of thousands of cameras- mostly set up outside and in the lobbies of private businesses- feeding video into the NYPD's lair downtown. Using facial recognition and other tracking technology, dissidents are "monitored" as they move about the city, the better to build dossiers on them, plot harassment tactics, surreptitiously enter their premises when they are away, and so on.

Bloomberg's police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, a former Marine and Vietnam War criminal, put CIA officers in charge of political repression in the police.

Until the bitter end, the Bloomberg regime pursued an appeal of the lawsuit brought against it over his massive stop-and-frisk institutionalized racist harassment, even though Bloomberg knew that his successor, Bill deBlasio, would drop the suit (de Blasio became Mayor today January 1st). deBlasio has already announced that the appeal would be dropped and the Federal judge's remedies would be enacted. (We will see.)

In short, the oppressor Billionaire marks his last day in official power in a manner appropriate with his repressive reign. Good riddance, Mayor Moneybags.